Archive for the ‘Expressive Change’ Category
My friend Vanessa recently sent me a spirited reflection on her experience of the people’s assembly that has been taking place in the streets of Athens, Greece over the last 25 days. She describes how the larger vision for direct democracy and healthy communities wasn’t simply a slogan to be shouted
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I was reading through the Zenith Cleaners blog recently and came across a reflection written by our friend Tolu Ilesanmi titled Invitation to the dance. In it he describes the kind of reciprocal relationship he works hard to create with his staff, clients and suppliers.
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I once asked a guy named Pedro, who had spent his life founding and working in one of the Mondragon industrial cooperatives, what his most engaging organizational experience had been. He gave me a kind of half-smile. “It was when we went bankrupt.”
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Just thought I’d preface this post with a note about my general relationship with technology. In short, I don’t like to be around it. I find computer monitors mind numbing. Keyboards send sharp pains up my right arm. I spent many years resisting pressures to buy a cell phone. True, I did organize my entire […]
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Last year, we wrote a blog post highlighting the work of Jonathan Glencross. Jonathan’s approach to environmental advocacy has helped spark some dramatic sustainability initiatives at McGill University. We thought you’d enjoy listening to a TedxTalk that he gave a few months ago to an audience of 700
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The other day Tana and I went to talk to Megan Webster who teaches at St. George’s, a school in Montreal that seems quite steeped in this idea of expressive change. Megan describes it as a place where teachers, staff, and students are all deeply engaged in their own learning and where people pay profound and appreciative attention to each other.
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Many of us are familiar with the phrase “Be the change you want to see in the world,” so much so that it has become a bit of a cliché. I’ve been wondering for a while now what else Gandhi said that relates to expressive social change, a concept that is at the heart of […]
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For a variety of reasons, many people react hesitantly at first to the idea of inscaping and experiential structuring. One of the things they worry about is that inscaping will turn into emotional indulgence.
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I once worked at an advocacy and training organization where, in an effort to look more professional in the eyes of our funders and partners, it was decided that all correspondence would have a uniform look- even down to the font that we used in our emails. I could handle the idea of uniformity for […]
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They are scattered about the steps and lawns. A knot of people puzzling over the relationship between education and politics. Sari-clad women practicing Brazilian martial arts. A group of home-schooled 10-year-olds selling handmade paperweights. A young man recounting with artistic precision his transformative experience on the front lines of the Egyptian revolution. There are workshops […]
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